AMJ Essay-The benefits of social bookmarking services in a classroom
=The benefits of social bookmarking services in a classroom= Ever since the creation of the read/write web many people have joined the vast number of those who are turning the web into a cavernous online library, music store, video store and etc. One of the most useful features of the read/write web is the social bookmarking service which has proved to be especially useful in education. In social bookmarking sites people add the links of pages they found useful and share them with others. This is really helpful because usually when you are looking for some kind of information on the web it takes a long time to find what you are actually looking for, but by sharing the link of that page you are helping those who might one day look for the same information to find it faster than you did. This service can be useful to anyone from any part of the world, but in this article the main focus is how social bookmarking service can be useful for students in educational systems. I believe the three most useful benefits of social bookmarking services have for students are communication, collaboration and critical thinking. With social bookmarking web sites we can communicate with others, see what was important to them about a similar topic we are looking for, learn other people's train of thought, and show them our own views and ideas. This will greatly help students broaden their views on different topics, and on the world itself, and learn that the same topic can have many different aspects and that different people have their own interpretations of the same topic. By asking student to work on a social bookmarking site we can ask them to help each other and to work on an assignment together and have a group work. For example in a literature class a teacher who wants the students to analyze a poem can ask them to do so on a social bookmarking site, and by doing so the students will share their ideas, perspectives and interpretations and also find out what their own peers think of the same poem. Thus they create a collaborating environment in which they help each other understand and learn better a single topic. Another feature of social bookmarking sites is adding tags to the contents. This feature will make students think critically about the topic, they need to relate the new information with what they had already known and to categorize them. And also they can find out how other have related the new material to what they had already known. By using social bookmarking services we can help our students to learn how to work together, how to look at something from different points of view and more importantly we are asking them to do all of the above in a way they actually enjoy, by using technology. This is why I believe it is so important for teachers and schools to adapt themselves with the modern world and generation, and why it is important to use social bookmarking services in education.